'Larrikin' has been colonised by the elite

By Melissa Bellanta

6 August 2012 — 3:00am

While the federal Treasurer, Wayne Swan, was treating us to some Bruce Springsteen lyrics last week, Telstra has been bringing us a new version of the Men At Work hit Down Under as part of its Olympics advertising campaign.

Down Under is celebrated as an alternative national anthem because of what many would call its larrikin character. The term ''larrikin'' has long been linked to notions of Australianness. In its current popular form, it refers to someone who engages in heroic beer drinking and cheeky humour, who identifies with the concepts of ordinariness, egalitarianism and the underdog.

John Singleton, Nathan Tinkler and Andrew Forrest [pictured] ... cultivate a larrikin persona and the sense that they support a "fair go" for all Australians.Credit:Rob Homer

The Men At Work song, of course, mischievously refers to beer drinking (it calls Down Under a place ''where beer does flow/and men chunder''). The song's co-writer, Colin Hay, has also been embraced as an underdog after having to pay damages to a music company - ironically called Larrikin Music Publishing - over a tendentious copyright claim.

But there may have been a good reason why the Treasurer ignored the lyrics of this tribute to larrikinism in his recent lecture on Australian culture, and not just because it puts chunder and Vegemite in close company.

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The idea of larrikinism actually spreads confusion about core Australian values. The problem with the larrikin ideal is that it links ocker mischief to anti-intellectualism, egalitarianism and ordinary Australianness, as if all of these things necessarily go hand in hand.

It is on that basis that certain pundits claim anyone with a whiff of intellectualism about them is an ''elite'' and therefore opposed to the interests of ordinary Australians. It is also on the basis of the myth of larrikinism that a number of super-rich Australians are able to present themselves as egalitarian.

I am thinking here, for example, of John Singleton, Nathan Tinkler and Andrew Forrest, the latter of whom was mentioned in Swan's speech last week. These men, and others like them, cultivate a larrikin persona and the sense that they support a ''fair go'' for all Australians.

Forget about the fact that Singo is more notable for his support of Gina Rinehart than for society's underdogs. Because the larrikin ideal works the way it does, it allows powerful Australians like him to gloss over the fact of their own elite status and to pretend that the real elites are elsewhere.

In fact, it is ironic that Australians have viewed the term ''larrikinism'' affectionately for decades. My research into the Australians who were first called larrikins in the late 1860s shows that they were violent, socially disadvantaged young men - the kind who today might have dealt out king hits outside Kings Cross pubs late at night.

These colonial larrikins were far more interested in big-noting themselves - whether as binge drinkers, flash dressers or bare-knuckle fighters with aggression to burn - than they were in being ''ordinary''.

This colonial larrikin phenomenon emerged at a time when the casualisation of labour and the absence of a minimum wage created a precarious future for unskilled youth. They faced this lack of opportunity at the same time as others were making fortunes from land speculation and mining shares.

The uneasy combination of aspiration and resentment that they expressed on the streets was largely due to their economic predicament.

The first larrikins emerged at a time when the underdog was stigmatised in Australian society. No one would have dreamt of calling themselves a larrikin in the late colonial years if they wanted to be held in regard by the broader society.

Now something that even billionaire mining magnates can make their own, our ideal of larrikinism has changed substantially since the era in which the term was coined.

The fact that its history was characterised by social inequity and violence, however, should make us pause before making too much of our ''larrikin streak''.

And while it might be fun to sing along to Down Under in the ad breaks, we should be wary of anyone who wants to tell us we have already achieved a truly egalitarian society.

Dr Melissa Bellanta is an ARC postdoctoral fellow at the University of Queensland and the author of Larrikins: A History (UQP). She will speak at Thought Broker's event ''Larrikins and Bohemians - the high and low lifes of Australian history'' on Thursday. See www.thoughtbroker.com.au.